When I was five years old, I told my mother that I wanted blonde hair. I was just a child – but as the only Asian girl in my grade (the token of my private school), all I wanted was to look like everyone else. The simple request broke my mother’s heart, especially since she took great care in making me feel proud of my heritage. My question mirrors that of Pecola’s in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, her character the realization of a life marked by racism and a lack of self-worth. The origins of this way of thinking are best seen in Cholly and Geraldine, illustrating that trauma is not prophesied at birth; rather, it is shaped by the racist structures of their environment, and thus the dirty pain is passed down to their children.
At the core of Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands is the idea that “trauma is not destiny” (83). This applies to all people, but in this context will be applied more specifically to the idea of racial self-hatred and racialized trauma. Although Menakem stresses that trauma is intergenerational, more specifically, racial self-hatred is projected upon its victims – minorities are not born loathing themselves. “Black self-hate and self-repulsion…attempts to manage the underlying discomfort and confusion, rather than to metabolize it” (Menakem 79). In short, racial self hatred is itself a trauma response to being Othered, not something inherent to our DNA. As the characters of The Bluest Eye show us, racial self-hatred mainly arises as a byproduct of the attempt to survive in a society that completely disregards and diminishes Black people; this learned behavior of self-hatred is then transferred intergenerationally as insecurities are projected upon children. Geraldine is perhaps the most prominent example of racial self-loathing as a survival tactic.
Before even being named, Geraldine’s character is illustrated through a detailed description of a specific type of Black woman; the women who come from the cleaner towns, who attend college, marry quickly, and keep a lovely home. In essence, Black women who have access to more privilege given their proximity to whiteness. Geraldine is one such woman whose life revolves around maintaining a reputable image so as to keep control over her space, then projecting her colorist and elitist values on her son. She is aware of her status as a Black woman, but teaches Junior that “The line between colored and [n-word] was not always clear; subtle and telltale signs threatened to erode it, and the watch had to be constant” (Morrison 87). Her inherent anti-Blackness is incredibly transparent to the viewer, but to Geraldine, she is simply doing what she believes is best for her child: keeping him within the supposed respectable circle of whiteness and ensuring he has a higher quality of life. Unfortunately, this in turn morphs Junior into a sadistic and unempathetic individual, fueled by his now internalized racial self-hatred. As a child he yearned to play with the other Black children, to “smell their wild blackness and say ‘Fuck you’ with that lovely casualness” (87). In a microaggression unwittingly directed at her own child, Geraldine bars Junior from being his authentic self. He grows to “agree with his mother that neither Bay Boy nor P.L. was good enough for him” (87), showing that his own racial self-hatred is purely a result of his mother’s words. These ideas are then punctuated and finalized by the incident with Pecola, culminating in Geraldine’s most explicit expression of her own self-loathing, calling Pecola a “nasty little black bitch” (92) and kicking her out of the house she has carefully crafted to separate herself from her own Black identity. This contempt for being Black manifests differently in Cholly, whose personal history the reader is given more insight to.
Cholly is positioned differently than Geraldine in the plot, as he is initially an abstract dark force that is only referenced to in the first half of the novel; once we finally reach his backstory, however, Morrison once again emphasizes the central point that we are all just products of our environments. Rejected by both of his parents and suffering the loss of Aunt Jimmy, Cholly is left with no concrete support system at a relatively young age, and is forced to navigate society alone. This already instills a sense of self-loathing and undesirability in him as an individual – one that is then amplified by his victimization at the hands of the voyeuristic white police. His first sexual encounter with Darlene quickly becomes petrifying, the act of undressing her attributed to “a violence born of total helplessness” (148). After the situation’s tension disperses, Cholly’s subconscious is voiced, with an inherent understanding that were he to resent the police, the feeling of racial inferiority and vulnerability would eat him alive; instead he directs his anger toward Darlene, “the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence” (151). He combines both the disdain of his own defenselessness and the misplaced disgust for Darlene, compounding to create a contagious sense of racial self-hatred. As opposed to Geraldine, who tries to sever her ties with her Black identity, Cholly expels his self-hatred in the form of violence against others. The Breedloves wear Cholly’s “ugliness” – that is to say, are affected by his dirty pain. Pecola’s innocence becomes the target of this racial self-hatred, as “the hauntedness would irritate him – the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn’t she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that?” (161). He cannot comprehend the idea of being loved and cherished, thus it compels him to enact control over his confusing emotions by assaulting her. Cholly’s experiences create create two opposing views: sex as power versus sex as humiliation. Through his life, he has learned that it is the unchangeable act of being Black that results in his displacement in society, and that exerting power over others is the only way he can feel any semblance of control in a society pitted against his race.
Although minorities are subject to certain patterns of trauma, the distinct issue of racial self-hatred is not something we are all destined (or rather, doomed) to endure. Our traumatic experiences arise as a result of the larger systematically racist structures around us, but ultimately any self-loathing we have towards our identity is taught to us by the people around us – most often within our own groups. As Geraldine and Cholly show us through their explicitly and implicitly abusive actions, unresolved racial self-hatred is transferred between generations. Only through the confrontation of that self-loathing can it evolve into clean pain from which we can grow.
Works Cited
Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage International, 2018.
